AbbyBirthdays: SaunterWing Celebration 2019 (Patreon)

 Its MY Birthday! Woo!
And Abby decides to celebrate with a sneak peak at her presents!
Of course the question is, are the presents for her?
Or is she the present?

Downloadable Gif:

The Rant:

So. It's finally MY Birthday.
Sure, I could have done a regular Abby Birthday... ...Or honestly not done anything at all, really. Not done a card, or maintained my regular posting schedule and just taken the day off to focus on my day job (can't not go in to work just cuz it's my Bday). But honestly, I like being "extra." Working is relaxing to me, as is the feeling of finished art, and its reception. So Abby gets her own full short animation.

This was actually a lot tougher than normal. If you caught me working on this on stream, you might have caught that this took longer than the game overs. You might have also hear me mention that this work "reminded me why I don't take animation commissions." This is because the game overs are actually a series of loops, rather than a prolonged animation. Even then, the loops are short, with only three major positions (struggle in one direction, center, struggle in the other direction, back to center, rinse repeat).  Meanwhile, this is an extended animation, with a few dynamic poses, which meant few reusable assets and a lot of "unknowns" in regards to pre-production (puppet vs traditional? if puppet, how much?). These are the unknowns that usually prevent me from taking on commission work because it can balloon in scope very quickly, especially now that I have less time than normal, AND I have enough trouble honoring my commission commitments already.

The other toughie was that this was timed to music. You'll notice that Abby hits certain plot beats ON certain music beats. This is tough because it both has to line up with music, but feel coincidental that she's done so. To do otherwise makes the animation feel uncanny and robotic, which breaks suspension of disbelief.

To get this all working, I first planned out a series of core "pose" storyboards, and lined them up with the music beats I wanted to hit.  This gave me a skeleton framework to build around.  I drew some key poses to connect those dots. Once I had my "animatic" (a kind of "visual script"), I then smoothed out my rough animation with some inbetweens. 

Now for the hard part: Clean-up.

Clean up and coloring are particularly hard for me, because my "comic artist" brain interjects in ways that makes lining my animations take particularly long. Things like lineweight and spot black shadows tend to creep into my brain and make me overthink my cleanup. This is worse with me because my rough animation tends to be REALLY ROUGH (not like the WiPs I used to share, those are a trick I'll share some other time), so I have to basically figure out what the drawing was supposed to be while cleaning it up, which is... not the best. If I'm cleaning traditionally, this eats up a MASSIVE amount of my time.

While I usually use puppet assets when animating loops, I'm loathe to do it for narrative animations because I'm never going to use those assets again in any capacity, and I hate creating single-use items like that. In hindsight, I should have used them more here. Instead, what I did was create disposable assets called "groups" (single use micro compositions) in place of "symbols" (multi-use microcompositions, with their own layers and timelines). Making groups allowed me to work faster, but it kept me from using my normal lighting techniques, which is why Abby isn't as "shiny" as she normally is. But the work was finished ON the due date, which is most important.

I should do more one-off joke animations, but I like doing the game overs for now, and they're a lot less intensive. Maybe I'll alternate? 

Either way, my birthday was wonderful, and I'm glad I also now have a card for those whom I can't deliver personalized cards for.

What do you think?
Let me know in the comments and thank you for your continued Patronage!